How to Send Midi from External Max Patch into a Max Instrument?

If I open up a patch in Max, and have m4l running a max instrument in ableton at the same time, then on the midiout dropdown list in the regular Max patch "max instrument" appears. Yet when I set it to send midi to the max instrument, it doesn’t seem to respond. Does anyone know why?

I have a korg padkontrol and I am controlling it with sysex messages, so I can’t use my patch in m4l because Live filters out sysex messages (arg!). So I would like to send in my midi signals to Live from an external patch which translates sysex messages into midi values. Yes, i could just use midi yoke or something like that, but I was just curious if I could bypass that step.